Precisionist perfect for a small exhibition

David Bonetti, EXAMINER ART CRITIC

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, February 24, 1999

"NATIVE MODERN: Charles Sheeler and Precisionism," at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through April 27, is a nice little show that serves better as an announcement for recent SFMOMA acquisitions than as an exhibition of art by American painter and photographer Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and the Precisionist movement in which he was a major participant.

Those with long memories might recall "Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern Photography," a 1982 touring exhibition organized by SFMOMA that took better measure of Precisionism, a between-the-wars art movement that combined strains of American realism with new abstract and avant-garde ideas emanating from Europe. Sheeler, painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford and photographers Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Imogen Cunningham were dominant figures in a field that sought to glorify both modern industry and the formal honesty of American vernacular architecture and craft.

That 1982 exhibition was dependent on loans from many institutions. With its notoriously skimpy collection, SFMOMA would be hard-pressed to mount such an exhibition without having to borrow major works - which is why its current drive to beef up the permanent collection with masterpieces is so important. Only last year, it would have been unable to organize "Native Modern." (Even now, it had to borrow a number of paintings and works on paper from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.)

The current show was organized by Douglas Nickel, SFMOMA associate curator of photography, essentially to trumpet the museum's acquisition of 11 vintage photographic prints by Sheeler. Ten prints in the cache, which includes five of Sheeler's circa 1917 Doylestown interiors and three from his famous series of Ford's River Rouge plant outside Detroit, came from the sale of duplicates from the New England-based William Lane collection.

According to photography world speculation, SFMOMA spent some $3 million on the photographs, a figure that has raised eyebrows. (Following standard museum policy, SFMOMA refuses to divulge what it spends in private sales; objects purchased at auction are part of the public record.)

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Even more impressive than the Sheeler purchases is SFMOMA's acquisition of 1,000 photographs from the collection of Prentice and Paul Sack, eight of which are included in "Native Modern." (The New York Times speculated that the collection was worth $5 million.) An exhibition featuring some 60 prints from the Sack collection opens at SFMOMA March 27.

Sack is a local real estate investor, and his collection naturally follows his business interest in focusing on architecture. His is a complicated gift. Rather than giving the photographs directly to the museum, Sack gave the collection to a trust he set up for SFMOMA's benefit. The three directors are to be himself; SFMOMA's director, currently David Ross; and its photography curator, currently Sandra Phillips. Sack receives the same tax benefit that he would if he had given the collection outright to the museum, and he retains the right to participate in its growth and use.

"Native Modern" might not be a complete exploration of its subject, but it suggests it well enough. It is a good example of the small exhibition that occupies a museum space on a scale somewhere between the permanent collection galleries and the "blockbuster." Currently, SFMOMA has also filled two of its galleries with paintings by Roy Lichtenstein that also nicely suggest the range of his career while falling considerably short of being a full-scale retrospective.

Filling three galleries, the exhibition traces three themes central to Precisionism: the American rural vernacular, New York City and modern industry.

In the gallery devoted to America's past, Sheeler's 1917 Doylestown images dominate. Today, these pictures of the interior corners of Sheeler's 18th century Pennsylvania farmhouse might seem so quiet as to be unremarkable, but they occupy an important place in American photographic history. They are widely credited with being among American photography's first abstractions, their radical cubist-informed vision being predated only by some of Strand's experiments.

Sheeler's extraordinary "Side of White Barn" from the same year shares the gallery. This surprisingly mature work exemplifies the modernist photography aesthetic. The plain white barn, painted stone below, painted wood above, is shot straight on, filling the print with its massive planar wall. The absence of sky at top or land at either side closes the structure off from its environment, creating a claustrophobic space, and the vertical paneling of the barn's wood reinforces the picture's flatness. Only the cropped-off fence receding toward the barn in the foreground suggests that the world might be three-dimensional. This is an image that Pablo Picasso would have understood and celebrated.

In the center gallery, Sheeler's peers come to the fore. Joseph Stella's painting, "Bridge" (1936), underscores American Precisionism's links with Italian Futurism. Alfred Stieglitz's pair of prints of the rising New York skyline, "From the Shelton, Looking West" (1935), one shot at night, one during the day, celebrate the city's verticality in a more meditative mode. Strand's "The Court, New York" (1924) a shot out a window (or from a roof) of adjacent tenement roofs, is a study in solid geometry that comes as close to abstraction as an unaltered photograph can.

The spirit of Precisionism is captured most sympathetically in the gallery in which modern industry is apotheosized. Sheeler's River Rouge photographs stand as testimony of his generation's industrial optimism. You can't see "Ford Plant - Blast Furnace" (1927) without a little retroactive poignancy, however. These furnaces of the future had but a short active history, and their obsolescence and abandonment form the subject of Bernd and Hilla Becher's most powerful works. Other photographs by Weston, Strand and Cunningham make this gallery particularly strong.

SFMOMA's acquisition of the Sheeler photographs gives its 10,000-image strong photography department additional depth, but the claim made in the exhibition's text panel that the museum is now a major repository of his work is a little too optimistic. Sheeler was a painter and a wonderful draftsman as well as a photographer, and SFMOMA owns only one, not terribly distinguished, late painting by him and no drawings that I know of. It should limit its crowing to its Sheeler photographs, which is not his whole story by a long shot.&lt;